STARS OF ANIMATION – György Kovásznai – short films /95 min./MONOLOGUE / 1963 / 12’5”
Owing to the issues it addressed and its multi-layered system of visual signs, which proved to be uncontrollable for the censorship, this film was a source of serious controversy. It was also dangerously outspoken. The narrator is a woman in her twenties. She traces her memories back to her childhood, questioning both the deeds of her grandparents – prior to World War I – and those of her parents – in the 1930s – making them accountable for their responsibilities, their roles, and the consequence of the two world wars.
METAMORPHOSES / 1964 / 6’5”
“This film is but a painting brought into a single movement. The colours are restlessly and incessantly searching for a kind of harmony that would most truthfully convey the painterly imagination. We intend to depict the characteristic movements of a male and a female portrait while searching for a relationship between them and the surrounding world”, this is to be read at the opening sequence of Kovásznai’s first metamorphic film painting. The film was an instant success and its distribution was not banned.
TALES FROM THE WORLD OF ART / 1965 / 10’
The humour and irony-laden art criticism of his previous films is further developed. Each of the three episodes acquired a different visual presentation. The first episode makes fun of the cinema (and its overstimulating effect), the second of the theatre (and its hypocrisy) and the third of the classical music (and its snobbism).
HAMLET / 1976 / 14’5”
The motives of moral decay, inner struggle, calculating revenge, cold-blooded murder, betrayal which is not meant to spare friendship, family ties or even love, but mostly the motives of distrust, revenge and the decay of community as backbones of the adaptation, are clear reflections of Kovásznai’s opinion about the prevailing situation in the 1960s’ Hungary. As many other of Kovásznai’s films, this one is a hybrid of styles. With equal spontaneity he combines traditional figurative with abstract pictures.
NIGHTS IN THE BOULEVARD / 1972 / 9’/
The image material was prepared by crewmembers sitting about and making drawings in cafés along Budapest’s Great Boulevard. The images were made in the style of a documentary film, yet not lacking elements of caricature, which is also accentuated by the recorded audio material. Whereas the conversations and music recordings were made by following the prerequisites for a documentary film, the role played by the poet (Kosztolányi’s spirit) endows the film with a fictitious lyrical dimension.
MEMORY OF THE SUMMER OF ’74 / 1974 / 10’5’’/
A subjective interpretation of the everyday life of the 1970s’ Budapest . It is an intriguing mixture of popular culture (music) and high art (composition of images). Kovásznai is not interested in telling a story; there is no linear narrative, the structure of the film is defined by the movements and transformations of the paintings to the rhythm of the music, generating a fundamentally audiovisual sensory experience.
WAVELENGTHS / 1972 / 10’/
With its unprecedented painting technique, this film is a milestone in the history of Hungarian and international animation and painting, just as his METAMORPHOSES. The painted, re-painted or edited details evoke astonishing associations as they are juxtaposed with unexpected sounds and effects from a radio soundscape. This film again instantiates Kovásznai’s primary role as a painter throughout his filmic oeuvre.
ÇA IRA: THE SONG OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION / 1973 / 10’/
Kovásznai created this unique series of paintings to the song of the French Revolution, after he had made his metamorphosing painting films. ÇA IRA is a succession of independent paintings. The resulting expressive film, with its dramatic atmosphere, is unparalleled in Kovásznai’s oeuvre as well as in the history of animation and painting.
PORTRAIT / 1982 / 11’
PORTRAIT was most clearly made in a documentary style, raising and analysing macro-societal questions. The similarity between the reviewed subjects evoked through drawings and the live personae is not a coincidence. The images they evoke through words are re-told through drawings.
Kino Apollo 8.00 p.m. tickets: 10 zl
